Salmagundi; or, The whim-whams and opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, esq. [pseud.] and others. By William Irving, James Kirke Paulding and Washington Irving. Printed from the original ed., with a preface and notes by Evert A. Duyckinck.

TIMIOTHY GIBLET. 163
rited the hatred of all these unlucky little shavers: for never
could we assemble about his door of an evening to play, and
make a little hubbub, but out he sallied from his nest like a spider, flourished his formidable horse-whip, and dispersed the
whele crew in the twinkling of a lamp. I perfectly remember
a bill he sent in to my father for a pane of glass I had accidentally broken, which came well-nigh getting me a sound flogging; and I remember as perfectly that the next night I
revenged myself by breaking half a dozen.
Giblet was as arrant a grubworm as ever crawled; and the
only rules of right and wrong he cared a button for, were the
rules of multiplication and addition, which he practised much
more successfully than he did any of the rules of religion or
morality. He used to declare they were the true golden rules;
and he took special care to put Cocker's arithmetic in the hands
of his children, before they had read ten pages in the Bible or
the Prayer-book. The practice of these favorite maxims was at
length crowned with the harvest of success; and after a life of
self-denial and starvation, and after enduring all the pounds,
shillings, and pence miseries of a miser, he had the satisfaction
of seeing himself worth a plum, and of dying just as he had
determined to enjoy the remainder.of his days in contemplating
his great wealth and accumulating mortages.
His children inherited his money; but they buried the disposition, and every other memorial of their father, in his grave.
Fired with a noble thirst for style, they instantly emerged from
the retired lane in which themselves and their accomplishments
had hitherto been buried; and they blazed, and they whizzed,
and they cracked about town, like a nest of squibs and devils in a
firework. I can liken their sudden eclat to nothing but that of
the locust, which is hatched in the dust, where it increases and